Saturday, February 27, 2016

What this country needs is plenty of Moxie

The West coast was not a huge Moxie fan back in the day. Easterners had the advantage of a drink that has been described as a combination Dr. Pepper and cough syrup. It preceded and out sold Coke and Pepsi in the beginning, but lost market position.

How could it fail with a spiel like this:

"Contains not a drop of Medicine, Poison, Stimulant or Alcohol. But is a simple sugarcane-like plant grown near the Equator and farther south, was lately accidentally discovered by Lieut. Moxie and has proved itself to be the only harmless nerve food known that can recover brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness. It has recovered paralysis, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia, and insanity when caused by nervous exhaustion. It gives a durable solid strength, makes you eat voraciously, takes away the tired, sleepy, listless feeling like magic, removes fatigue from mental and physical over work at once, will not interfere with action of vegetable medicines.

PLANTATION STYLE MINT JULEP

BOYLAN'S ORIGINAL BIRCH BEER

"Although we may be the smallest soda company around, our flagship brand is the most locally loved soft drink of its time. Rich with history, Boylan's Birch Beer started in a apothecary in the early 1890's and developed into the most popular flavor of The Boylan Sodaworks. Boylan was a bottling and keg filling operation located in the heart of Paterson, NJ, the first industrialized city in the country.

Competition increased however, and in the 1930's Boylan was forced to close its bottling lines, leaving Boylan's Draught Birch Beer as its only product. Shortly thereafter, the rights to the name, the formula, and the sole route was purchased by the driver. He, by himself, was responsible for pulling Boylan's Draught Birch Beer from near extinction to a beverage that is enjoyed by thousands at Fourth of July parades, town picnics, hot dog stands and many good times.

His reward for this accomplishment was a 7 day - 80 hour work week, but he would have it no other way.

In appreciation of our grandfather's effort, we honor him with this bottling project."

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Avoid wasting time and resources

A bad PowerPoint presentation doesn't even make for good nap time. Some one is always jabbering about something.

Dave Paradi has written an article about this problem.

"If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per day. At an average salary of $35,000 per year for those attending the meeting, the cost of that wasted time is a staggering $252 million and change each day."

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Word makes judgments

When text is selected, Word must examine the styles that have been applied and determine which to keep and which to overwrite.

Type the following text:

This line will test how styles and formatting work in Word.

Select all the text, and then apply italic formatting.

Select all the text, and then apply a style such as Heading 1.

You notice that italic formatting is not retained.

Select all the text, apply the Normal style, and then remove the italic formatting.

Select "work in Word" in the text, and then apply the italic formatting.

Select all the text, and then apply the Heading 1 style.

You notice that the italic formatting is retained.

'This behavior occurs because Word uses a specific rule to determine whether to apply a style to selected text. According to this rule, Word applies a style depending on the percentage of the selected text that already has formatting applied. For example, if you already applied formatting to less than 50 percent of the selected text, this formatting is retained when you apply a style. If the selected text includes multiple paragraphs, Word first calculates the percentage of text that is formatted in the first paragraph. Then, it examines the paragraphs in the same range. If the formatting that is applied to the text in the paragraphs that follow the first paragraph differs from most of the formatting in the first paragraph, Word does not apply the style to the following paragraphs. Therefore, the formatting is retained in these paragraphs."

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

HEADING

By Allen Kurzweil

Book Description
"Narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests, The Grand Complication propels the reader through a card catalog of desperation and delight, of intrigue and theft. It's a novel of suspense that comes full circle, with a clock-maker's precision and a storyteller's surprise, on page 360."

Quote

"THE SEARCH BEGAN with a library call slip and the gracious query of an elegant man.
"I beg your pardon," said the man, bowing ever so slightly. "Might I steal a moment of your time?"

He deposited his slip on the reference desk and turned it so that the lettering would face me. And if this unusual courtesy wasn't enough to attract attention, there was also the matter of his handwriting — a gorgeous old-fashioned script executed with confident ascenders and tapering exit strokes — as well as the title of the book he requested. Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century Furniture played right to my fascination with objects of enclosure.

"Let's see what we can do for you, Mr. — " I double-checked the bottom of the slip before uttering his improbably literary name. "Henry James Jesson III."

After I had directed him to the tube clerk, curiosity got the best of me, so I rang the stack supervisor and asked that she expedite retrieval. In a further breach of protocol, I pushed through the swing gate and planted myself near the dumbwaiter in Delivery, where I waited for the book to surface.

"This is terribly kind of you," Jesson said as I slid Secret Compartments under the brass grille.

"Glad to be of service."

I was professional enough not to mention the uncanny overlap of our interests — I don't meet many readers keen on lettering technique and enclosures. But that same restraint left me mildly disappointed. The call slip was so enticing, our exchange so stilted and brief.

Jesson settled himself at a table near the municipal tax codes. He quickly supplied further proof of a charmingly outmoded manner by digging deep into his capacious trouser pockets to extract a roll of paper, a tiny ink pot, and a calligraphy pen. Though he seemed to ignore the stares of nearby readers, he occasionally glanced in my direction, as if to confirm that I'd stuck around. Which, of course, I had. In fact, while he took notes on Secret Compartments, I took notes on him, convinced that the consonance of our uncommon pursuits demanded annotation.

He wore billowy trousers of moss-green corduroy that had wale as thick as pencils. These he partnered with a button-down shirt of subtle stripe and a dainty chamois vest tied at the back with a fat purple ribbon. He had an indulgent-looking face and blue-gray eyes that recalled the color of the buckram on my compact OED. Despite a bump at the bridge of his nose and teeth that predated fluoridation, he was undeniably handsome, a scholar who appeared unencumbered by the tattered frugality of most academics I assist. Those, in toto, were my preliminary observations of the elderly man wishing to steal a moment of my time."

A watch that shows the phases of the moon, for instance, is said to have one complication. A watch with five of these extra actions is said to be a grand complication.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Things should to function

Frank Rice has written a "show how" about creating functions that are not included in the box.

"Excel allows you to create custom functions, called "User Defined Functions" (UDF's) that can be used the same way you would use SUM(), VLOOKUP, or other built-in Excel functions.
The Excel user who wishes to use advanced mathematics or perform text manipulation is often seriously disappointed by Excel's limited library of formulas and functions. A UDF is simply a function that you create yourself with VBA.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

A morning's home companion

The Writer's Almanac®, a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor, can be heard each day on public radio stations throughout the country. Each day's program is about five minutes long.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Umpty ump definitions and references — maybe even a googol.

We all know/knew that a nibble is four binary digits or half of a (eight-bit) byte and that a crumb is jargon for two bits (two binary digits). However, there must be some other definitions that don't pop into mind right away.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

(Almost, if you've got the parts laying around)

From the "Not quite too hard to do" file. Construct your own DVR from a leftover PC.

"I started with an old PC (a Dell Dimension 4500) that had unfortunately been destroyed by lightning. After some experimentation, I figured out that the only bad portions of the PC were the motherboard and the modem (which I didn't need anyway). I decided to replace the motherboard and keep the same case and other hardware because I really liked Dell's clamshell case design. I did some research at my local Fry's electronics store and got a motherboard that would allow me to use the same memory, processor, and case. After getting . . . . .

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Tutorials, Tools, and Links

"Cascading Style Sheets separate the presentation from the structural markup of a web site. By applying a CSS style you have the ability to keep the structure of your document lean and fast, while controlling the appearance of the content.

HTML was intended as the structural markup language. This language focuses on the roles that the different elements of a document have to play, not how they have to look. CSS has been invented and developed for the Internet. It is not an adapted tool from print or programming, but a means of enhancing HTML."

CSS Creator site is a place for you to learn about and create CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. The CSS Forum is a place where you can discuss CSS page layouts, positioning, bugs and just about anything related to cascading style sheets. The forum is new, free and most of all needs people like you to create a community. Talk about CSS, ask questions, find solutions, and help each other learn at the CSS Forum.

The original CSS Creator is a CSS generator, which you can use to create styles and test them on your site. If you are learning CSS have a look and see how changes will affect your site and generate the styles. The CSS Creator has been used tested on 5266 urls.

The CSS Layout Generator will generate layouts with a flexible center column and fixed width left and or right column. All columns will be the same length, the layout can be centered on the page or full width and a header and footer can be easily added. 10545 CSS Layouts have been generated.

A light weight multi level menu, which uses a very small JavaScript file for browsers with bad CSS support. The markup of the menu is simply unordered lists, it can support multiple levels and will degrade to a simple unordered list if CSS is turned off.

A Useful CSS Links page has been added to the site and contains great links to CSS tutorials, tools, tips from all over the web.

Monday, February 08, 2016

Learn by example

When you realize that tattoos are only skin deep.

"Some people may look at this website, browse through the portfolios, and come to the conclusion that they want to become part of Steve's art. Some others may immediately decide that they don't like what they see. They may be offended or horrified by the subject matter, by the form that Steve's art takes, by the extreme individualism exhibited herein.

So one person's idea of body modification is going to be a pierced ear lobe, and another person's idea of body modification is to look like the el Diablo himself. Just because you don't agree doesn't make it wrong."

Saturday, February 06, 2016

Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud

The Advance Fee Fraud (AFF) is known internationally as "4-1-9" fraud after the section of the Nigerian penal code which addresses fraud schemes.
(BTW, it is pronounced 4-1-9, not four-nineteen.)

You've most probably been approached via email to help some poor soul smuggle millions out of some war torn province in return for a generous finder's fee.

"A renowned psychiatrist from UC Irvine was duped into squandering at least $1.3 million of his family's fortune on a Nigeria Internet scam, according to a lawsuit recently filed by his son.

The son, also an Orange County doctor, said his father - Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk - gave as much as $3 million over a 10-year period in response to an Internet plea that promised the doctor a generous cut of a huge sum of cash trapped in African bank accounts in exchange for money advances.

Gottschalk - who at 89 still works at the UCI campus medical plaza that bears his name - said in court papers that the losses were caused by "some bad investments."

Guy Gottschalk is asking a judge to remove his father as administrator of the $8-million family partnership that was set up for tax purposes after the death of his mother in 1993. A hearing is set for March 14.

The suit alleges that Louis Gottschalk destroyed bank records to cover up the amount of his losses.

"While it seems unlikely, even ludicrous, that a highly educated doctor like [Gottschalk] would fall prey to such an obvious con, that is exactly what happened," wrote Guy Gottschalk's attorney in court papers."

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

What the other guy says has weight

Gar Reynold has put together a list of some other sites that can help bolster any argument, no mater how specious.

"In my presentations, I may have several slides which feature a quote from a famous (sometimes not so famous) individual in the field. The quote may be a springboard into the topic or serve as support or reinforcement for the particular point I'm making. A typical Tom Peters presentation at one of his seminars, for example, may include dozens of slides with quotes. 'I say that my conclusions are much more credible when I back them up with great sources,' Tom says."

Monday, February 01, 2016

To quickly create a multi-field primary key, while in the table's Design View:
Hold the Ctrl key and click each field that you want to make up the primary key.
Choose Edit>Primary Key from the menu bar, or click the Primary Key button on the toolbar.